Yesterday, we began getting calls and emails from the users of one of the sites we support. Normally, we’d just tell them that they have to go through their local help desk first and have them troubleshoot their issue first before they send it along anywhere. But many of them were telling us the local techs there were the ones telling them to call or email us directly and they wanted help immediately, and almost all of them were for things we either had no access to or couldn’t do a thing about, on account of not having any Matrix staff located there. Among the issues they contacted us for were a keyboard replacement, access to a database we didn’t even know existed, and my personal favorite, access to be able to watch a YouTube video. We all told them in, with $localCIO copied on the email, that since these are all local issues, they need to be handled by local techs, and despite some further neepage from a couple of them, many resigned themselves to doing what they were supposed to have done in the first place… call the help desk.

After successfully doing a file restoration of the root directory and the one for the forum, both are back up fully. There still may be some residual spam on the board whilst I find a suitable anti-spam plugin, now that I can actually install them on there 🙂

The forum is now back up and running. I’ll be in the process of installing Antispam features on it very soon, so bear with me 🙂

Update: My domain host really screwed the pooch. They seem to have put the install files for the forum software on the root of the domain, and in doing so, overwrote some files that caused it (and the forum) to be borked. I’m gonna have to go thru & delete the files, then upload it again and redo the config file for the forum. I may even be forced to just install a new forum and use the same database as the former one to preserve the content already posted…

Sped, Inc. was a pretty small company. We only had two people on our IT staff to service several hundred employees, but the two of us were true geeks, so we often tried to engineer solutions that, frankly, were totally unappreciated by the frontline staff. One of my prouder accomplishments was creating “dashboards” for the employees. Since most of their work involved web apps, I created a basic web page for each of their departments, with links directly to all their tools. I set it to be the home page of their browser, then locked out the ability to change the home page. This way, there was never a complaint of “I can’t find this!”

Some employees liked it, most had a “Sure, whatever.” reaction, which to me was a strong success story given our audience. One lady flipped her shit. She sat down at her desk the morning after I changed her browser, and hurried to get me.

“I CAN’T GET ON THE INTERNET!!!”

She pulled me out of my office and showed me her computer, in a panic. I proceed to open up Firefox and the dashboard comes up just as expected.

“Sure you can.”

“Well… this is all that comes up!”

“…and it’s on the internet. So if that’s coming up, you’re online.”

“That’s not what used to be there.”

“Nope. That’s our new department homepage. It has all your tools on it, see?”

“So that’s all I can get?”

“You can get whatever you want. Just type in the address of whatever page you want to go to, and you’ll be fine.” I then realize she’s one of THOSE people… the ones that don’t know what the address bar is or what it does. If she can’t navigate there with a mouse, she has no idea it exists. Of course, she’s an administrative assistant, a job that should require at least adequate internet skills, but of course, we live in a world where actually knowing how to do your job is unimportant.

What she’s trying very hard NOT to tell me, is that her REAL problem is that she can’t get to her favorite celebrity gossip page this way. That’s how she spends 90% of her time at work, and I’ve just made it slightly inconvenient for her.

After I’ve shown her that she’s online, and told her she can go anywhere, her brilliant conclusion is “…So, you’re telling me I can’t get on the internet.”

“No, I’m telling you you CAN get on the internet, and you’re on the internet right now.”

She sits down in her chair “Don’t know what I’m supposed to do my job if I can’t get on the internet…”